The newsletter/website publishing platform Substack has a lot to commend it but there’s some things which are inexplicably difficult to achieve. One of those is to find UK local news outlets. This is partly due to the USA centric nature of the platform which means a search for ‘local’ is as likely to offer you Ohio as Oldham. (Substack’s own pick of local news is here, just one UK.)
Aside from my own (The Northern Eco), the well known Edinburgh Minute and Manchester poster child The Mill, there’s undoubtedly plenty more people reporting on their own -communities but they just aren’t very visible unless you’re in their locale.
So, until the US platform bosses provide some much needed UK filtering tools, I’m going old school and compiling my own map.
I started doing this for my own work identifying local outlets to contact about a news story happening outside of my patch and quickly realised it wasn’t going to be a simple job. Hopefully sharing this work to date will winkle a few more out of the woodwork.
As an avid follower of local news evolutions, the migration to Substack from other platforms such as Medium or WordPress, is worthy of some greater attention so I’d love to get a handle on some numbers to see what’s happening.
As you’ll see on the map, there’s visibility in the south of Scotland (h/t Michael MacLeod’s genourosity in recommending so many other publications I was able to plunder) but I’m struggling further south and Wales is showing as a desert.
This can’t be all the Substacks there are in the UK doing local news, so please do contact me or drop a link in the comments and I’ll add you in to the map.
- If you’d like to see a rather beautiful map of every Substack newsletter based on recommendations from one newsletter to another. The tool shows the local neighbourhood of a Substack, categorises each newsletter, and does semantic analysis to plot them. Check out substacks.space
Dim Sum Digital 